A Quick Note On This Review: This article includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org as a way of supporting both local bookshops and my own ability to write.
Diana Bishop is many things — an accomplished historian and professor in Oxford England, a foremost authority on alchemical history, and a beloved niece — but one thing she wishes she wasn’t was a witch. Diana has shunned her magical inheritance since her parents died and is striving to make a name for herself outside of the magical community when she comes across a book in the Bodlein Library that draws the attention of every witch, demon, and vampire in the vicinity. Soon, Diana is forced to trust in an alliance with Matthew Clairemont, a fellow professor and vampire, as she tries to figure out why everyone wants the book so badly, and what role she plays in the larger questions such a manuscript raises.
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness has been a well-known title for some time, and with good reason. The book is largely a romance, with a heavy focus on the budding relationship between Matthew and Diana at the core of every plot point, but unlike titles like Twilight by Stephenie Mayer, Harkness’s book holds far more in it than romance for anyone who’s uncertain about the story, as I was for years.
Diana and Matthew are forced to reckon with institutional powers than they simultaneously respect and chafe under, and their roles as professors in their respective disciplines sometimes leads the book to feel more like an adventure through time and magic than a romantic fantasy. Matthew — even while smitten and seeking to protect Diana — doesn’t just rage the way many vampire books do, but takes counsel with trusted advisers and seeks to wage war against those who wish to do her harm. In the same way, Diana doesn’t fall into tropes in other romantic novels where she’s helpless or else helplessly at the mercy of her emotions, but instead gets portrayed with the full force of Harkness’s ability to render an inquisitive, incisive, and ultimately feminist protagonist who doesn’t see love, empathy, and strength as fundamentally incompatible.
For casual readers, the romantic elements may be the easiest thing to point to as appealing because Harkness paints a more complex picture of romantic love than some other titles of the genre, but does so without breaking the promise that romance stories make to their readers. In some ways, it would fit pretty well within anyone’s library who possess The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo or The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Read, because all of them deal with the topic of romance without creating a two-dimensional portrait, free from issues or the work that makes relationships viable. However, Harkness’s novel is also rich in its world-building, using historical details along with folklore to create an experience that feels new, even if someone has read the likes of Stoker’s Dracula, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, which can make it immensely enjoyable for anyone whose literary preferences lean that way.
For writers, A Discovery of Witches has a number of interesting facets that make it valuable for someone with literary ambitions. It is unsurprising that Harkness, a trained historian, has skill with wielding historical details, but her ability to weave them into a narrative as cohesive as A Discovery of Witches while also taking the reader on an adventure would be beneficial to any writer looking to meld historical and action fiction into their work. A Discovery of Witches also provides a useful template for anyone interested in working with vampires, witches, or demons, as Harkness’s depiction differs in unique ways from most popular fiction, with the human component forefront in her illustrations, mixed with animalistic aspects for contrast. While several reviews have noted that Harkness’s book is a bit slow at points, this is likely cluing into the atmospheric elements that A Discovery of Witches has, which adds to the world building that I found so striking. For anyone seeking to work in low-fantasy or else create a world that has a connection to reality, Harkness’s book would be a good read for understanding a different way of accomplishing that than other books have done.
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What’s Next?
I am an avid reader and have quite a few thoughts on how some books could benefit both people that want to be entertained and those looking to sharpen their literary skills.
If you’re interested in finding out more about what I’ve been reading – and how it could benefit you – I will be publishing those thoughts on a weekly basis. Check back next week for a discussion of Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black!
The Writerly Review 